Is it a bad practice to create a custom winforms app as an installer?
I can't find an installer on the market. I like this open source or free. Of course I would like to use Install shield, but my project needs to be completed within budget.
I was thinking about creating a custom win forms app to handle installation, this is an acceptable practice. Or should I create a custom MSI?
If MSI is the route, what tools should I use?
Essentially I need to do the following in the installer:
- Create an IIS application
- Set permissions
- Install Console Application
- Create scheduled task
then when correcting
- Replace bin dll for IIS application
The built-in installers provided by Microsoft are not flexible enough to create stand-alone IIS applications.
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MSI is Microsoft's recommendation for installing anything.
Of course, there are simpler cases where xcopy deployment is fine, or you can have your own installer. But in complex cases, users need auditing and uninstallation capabilities, familiar user interface, pre-validation (among others) that comes with MSI.
You can customize the MSI-based installation that is done using Visual Studio.
I usually write scripts using Javascript for customization and then install the Javascript script as a "custom install action".
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If you can do this, just create your own installer as executable. It can either download the installed file or download the zip file and then run the executable which will have all the files that will be used for the installation.
I've done this before as I needed to do some steps that VS2003 couldn't do and it didn't feel like they were running an executable to users.
Just make sure you have some version in the file or in the registry so you can determine if you need to update as there might be some extra steps when upgrading between 1.2 and 3.8 if some people don't update often.
While your setup is working, make sure it provides good information about what you are doing and how far you are going, which will help people feel better.
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You can create a Windows Installer using Visual Studio and add custom actions to do what you want.
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I've had good success with Inno Setup. It uses a language similar to pascal and has a GUI helper application called ISTool. It's free / OSS and well documented. I can't imagine having to write my own installer when there are so many options. Other tools I've looked at are NSIS (already mentioned), WIX (Microsoft open sourced MSI building tool) and of course a VS setup project with custom scripts.
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